[Unomaestro]

I arrived in Yokota, Japan on April 6th and conducted my first ESL class this evening. It is a blend of both men and women with varied levels of comprehension of the English language. The advantage of this class is that they want to learn. I want to learn as well from them so we exchanged words and phrases throughout the evening. The lesson plan went out the window in the first hour. They chose to prepare a meal and have dinner conversation next week. We are not actually going to eat but we will describe all of the ingredients, tools, appliances and so forth that will be required. I use Karaoke as part of my tutorial. Many of them know how to sing the words of a song perfectly but do not have an understanding of their meanings. I let them pick a song from the 38,000 songs that I have on my USB hard drive and we disected it. (they like that word, it translates directly in to Japanese) It was great fun and I learned a few Japanese words that are not in my Translator. I will keep in touch. CW